Episode 7: Murcia Murcia Me!! (Part 2)

In my previous blog, I omitted to mention that the TV in the villa only showed english programmes. Shame that!! The massive satellite dish on the roof could have housed a small Indonesian nation but instead, it did it’s best to bring me, direct from the UK, programmes that I have been missing out on whilst here in Spain. It was only when I looked at the TV guide that I realised I didn’t like anything that was on all week, so we watched BBC News 24 and left it at that. The thing is that my in-laws survive on a diet of shouty TV shows and game shows. I mean, bless them, they’re in their 80’s so why not??? That said, I hate the damn things. The game shows I can deal with, they don’t bother me in the slightest. The problem I have is with the shouty ones. These are programmes that make Jeremy Kyle look like ‘Panorama’. Spanish TV will have it’s own personal blog post a little further down the line, but for the moment, you get the general gist.

The villa at twilight, with no shouty telly in the background

Needless to say, Pepe and María were more than a little miffed to find that they would actually have to talk to one another all week, rather than bury their brains in some sex scandal involving the next door neighbour of a woman who was on Big Brother (‘Gran Hermano’) in 1997 and who was evicted in the first week but made subsequent headlines because she was later filmed everywhere she went with her baps out. Fine if you’re on the beach; not too dandy if you´re going to the opera! Me? Well I admit to being more than a little pleased as those programmes fry my brain. I was just settling down to a life of relative bliss and calm in the sun trap on the roof when my father-in-law discovered a new instrument of torture……a short wave transistor radio.

Not your regular
instrument of torture.
Other brands
are available!

If you´ve ever listened to short wave, it´s the equivalent of sitting at the end of a tin can on a length of string and having someone shout into the other end from a room down the hall. I listened in abject horror as the station was tuned in and some guy started shouting through the tin can at his end. I swear the sound emitted from that thing killed an entire colony of ants who, rather than marching out to collect the sweet things we´d inadvertently left lying around, committed hari-kiri. I´m with the ants. I nearly chucked myself off the roof and had done with it, but I decided to soldier on.

Imagine then, my joy at coming back from a trip to the local supermarket to find that the outlaws were listening to the Scotland/Spain match on Tuesday evening. The shouty man at the end that night must have had a large catering tin can, as his shoutiness was much more pronounced than during the day and resulted in even our regular dining companions (the wasps) leaving us alone. I endured about 30 minutes of this whilst eating dinner until Spain scored. Oh my!! Instead of just shouting “It´s a goooal” like they do in the UK, the shouty man shouted "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL” I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. The shouting went on for so long that by the time he´d finished, Spain had scored again and Greece were halfway to sorting out their financial crisis. Eventually I´d had enough and had to go inside to do something a little less anoying instead, like banging my head against the kitchen counter for 20 minutes.

The next morning I got up around 9am (Ah, the memories!) and pottered around, but there was no sign of the in-laws. I thought they were still in bed, so went out and chucked myself in the pool for a little while and went up to the roof to dry off in the morning sun. Eventually José got up and opened his parents bedroom door, where we discovered that there was no-one in there. We were rather isolated up there in the mountains and went through the rather scary thought process that they could have been taken by aliens in the middle of the night and were at that moment hovering in an unseen spacecraft and being probed in areas where not even the hot Spanish sun shone. We decided to have breakfast though, as one doesn´t report alien abductions on an empty stomach.

Before we´d finished our wheaty-pops, the sound of keys in the gate stirred us and we looked up to find two grinning pensioners, looking for all the world like the cats who had the cream. We asked, of course, what was occurring and they showed us almonds, all-in-all, not what we expected. And there weren´t just a few almonds, but loads of the damned things. Thousands in fact. It was like a scene from The Great Escape as pockets were emptied and bloomer legs were shaken out in order to divest themselves of their booty. José was mortified but had it explained to him that there were hundreds of almond trees up the hill with these things on just asking to be picked. By now his mortification had turned to abject horror.

“You stole those almonds???”

“No of course not. They were sitting there and no-one was picking them, so we did”

“But they´re not yours to pick. You stole them”

“We didn´t steal them. No-one wanted them so we liberated them and brought them here to give them a new home”

José ran around the house, closing up doors and windows, as it was only a matter of time before someone reported them to the police and we were confronted by a whole load of squad cars waiting to take them to chokey. Nothing happened and so for the next few hours, the new instrument of torture was the sound of almonds cracking or the shell being banged on the dining table in order to open them. When the radio then went on to accompany this sound, I jumped in the pool and hid under the water for as long as I could.

Shortly before I went under

The next morning brought a fresh batch of almonds and by the evening, they were getting more organised. Bags were brought into play and the oldies were blatantly robbing the almond trees in the cut opposite our villa, which actually belonged to the people in the villa on the other side of the road and down the mountain a little. Nothing perturbed this almond gangster and his moll as they brazenly collected another stash of contraband before retiring to the comfort of our own patio and the pleasing sound of yet more almonds cracking.

Geriatric synchronised robbing from
Pepe Corleone and his moll, Almond Lill

You´d imagine that this would be enough. They´d already acrued enough almonds to put the euro butter mountain to shame, but no, the following morning they were out on the rob once again. This time they were busted. Someone walked by and shouted to them. They looked up and gave them that “we are in our eighties you know” look which meant that they could have committed first degree murder and got away with it. The guy they were speaking to told them that the almond picking season was actually in August and early September, so as it was October, no-one else was taking these and they could have as many as they liked. That was it! The thrill of the chase was gone and so they curtailed their thieving activities as quickly as they´d started them. They came back to the house with a few paltry almonds and couldn´t even be arsed to crack them. Pepe went back to swatting flies and his tinny radio whilst María retired to the kitchen and made a tortilla for lunch.

If she poked me with that stick
one more time, she'd have been
wearing it!

Our last full day in Murcia saw us take a trip up to the Mirador (or lookout place) in the mountains. Unfortunately, when we got there we realised that we´d not been told a 4x4 would have been useful, so Miguelito, our little Seat Ibiza, came to a grinding halt and would indignantly go no further. We got out to survey the beautiful countryside and I could see out of my peripheral vision that there was someone looking at us. I ignored the woman, but eventually could do so no longer as she was poking me with the large tree branch she used as a walking stick and insisting she knew me from before. The family rescued me and talked to her about her life there, how long she´d been there and, of course, what her almond yield had been like that year (memories of a previous idealistic and not altogether lawful time!!). She answered a little, but kept on about how she´d met us before, “particularly him” as she poked me again. Her 4 tombstone teeth made me wonder if she´d been a British holidaymaker to Benidorm in the sixties and had taken too many hallucinogenic drugs before deciding that she was actually Spanish and settling in the middle of nowhere.

Pepe wandered back to the car. He looked at me and made the whirring motion at the side of his head with his index finger. I hadn´t the heart to tell him that this wasn´t considered to be the correct way of suggesting that someone had mental health problems and just let it lie, although should I ever decide to go for a job in the mental health services here in Spain in the future, I could at least speak the official lingo in sign language. The poor old lady wittered on and on and on and I could see José and María getting a little fed up and trying to leave. No, she insisted, I´ve seen you all before. Eventually, we told her that we were The Nolan Sisters and that she would have seen us on TV a lot in the late 70´s and early 80´s. This seemed to placate her enough for her to let go of her grip on us so we could get back to the car and drive off.

It was only a matter of time before
Betty made it into my blog!

And so, after a 980km drive on the Saturday, we made it back to dear old Coruña and the news that the very lovely Betty Driver had died at the ripe old age of 91, may she rest in peace. The tinny radio has been replaced with yet more shouty people on the TV and María has cooked us a delicious lunch, which today was;

STARTER: ´Surprising´ gazpacho (surprising because it had almonds in it)

MAIN COURSE: Almond Chicken with douchesse potatoes

DESSERT: Bakewell tart

If anyone wants any almonds, just email me and I´ll pop some in the post in a jiffy bag.